Official blog of the Sacramento Progressive Alliance, one of the largest and most vibrant progressive activist groups in California with more than 8,000 members. We educate and mobilize Progressives in Sacramento, the surrounding foothill areas, and at Sac State and Folsom Lake College.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

The Paradox of Paul Ryan: Why the Tea Party’s Right to be Wary

There’s a paradox to all this. Despite his ideological kinship with the anti-government crowd, Paul Ryan is the embodiment of the troika of money, power, and politics that corrupts and controls the capital, the very thing the tea partiers detest.

Only in a world where Cosmopolitan magazine can declare the Kardashians “America’s First Family” and the multi-billionaire loose cannon Donald Trump is perceived by millions as the potential steward of our nuclear arsenal could about-to-be Speaker of the House Paul Ryan be savaged as insufficiently right-wing.

This is after all a man who made his bones in Congress and the Republican Party as an Ayn Rand-spouting, body building budget-buster slashing away at the body politic like a mad vivisectionist, as well as an anti-choice, pro-gun zealot who never met a government program he liked (except the military, whose swollen budget he would increase until we are all left naked living in a national security state).

Monday, October 19, 2015

After
arguing for
months that its members are underpaid and need a significant salary
bump to make up for years of stagnation, the California State University faculty
union and CSU management failed to reach an agreement last week on a new
contract.

While
the university offered 2 percent raises to all employees this year, the
California Faculty Association wants a 5 percent compensation hike for its
members, with additional 2.65 percent boosts for those at the lower end of
their pay ranks. The CSU administration rejected that plan, which would cost
about $102 million, for taking up too much of the budget increase it just
secured from the state.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Author Peter Mathews
rips the lid off the source of political corruption, and tells “How to Reclaim
the American Dream for All”

Saturday, October 17, 2015

California Grange, 3830 U Street

(just east of Stockton Blvd.)
6:30PM

Meet Peter Mathews,
Professor of Political Science and Sociology, TV and Radio Political Analyst
and Guest Host. Get his book Dollar Democracy: With Liberty and Justice for
Some; How to Reclaim the American Dream for All, and connect with local
organizations participating in the fight for sustainability, social justice and
a democracy by and for we the people.

Sponsored by Sacramento Move to Amend and the Sacramento
Community Grange

The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest such group in the United States (formed in 1982 by a merger of the New American Movement—a group I was in—and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a remnant of the old Socialist Party of America. Today the stated view of DSA (which has formally endorsed Sanders) is this:

Democratic socialists do not want to create an all-powerful government bureaucracy. But we do not want big corporate bureaucracies to control our society either. Rather, we believe that social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect.

Today, corporate executives who answer only to themselves and a few wealthy stockholders make basic economic decisions affecting millions of people. Resources are used to make money for capitalists rather than to meet human needs. We believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them.

Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives.

Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods.

Obviously, not every democratic socialist is a member of DSA, including Sanders himself. And other democratic socialists take a different view on some matters. But the approach laid out above is clearly not the authoritarian socialism that some would like to make of it.

[Full disclosure, I was a member of New American Movement from 1971 until it merged with DSOC in 1982 to become DSA, a group I have been associated with since then.]

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

“I did not say anything. I was
always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the
expression in vain. We had heard them … and had read them … now for a
long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had
no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was
done with the meat except to bury it. … Abstract words such as glory, honor,
courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the
number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929, Shocken edition 1969 p. 185)

Considerations

As Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign continues to
gather support, he comes under ever sharper scrutiny – not only by Republican
and Democratic Party opponents, but by others who are themselves working to
address the social inequities that abound in our society. Some such
criticism is itself destructive; the tendency to view every insufficient step
forward as a form of betrayal is a charge that every alternative candidate from
Eugene Debs to Jesse Jackson has faced. Yet criticism and debate is a
healthy and necessary part of the process of building a social justice movement
that is rooted in the diverse and unequal experiences of our society. The
idea that unity can be created solely by seeking to overcome economic
inequality — as a goal shared by all working people — while putting all other
concerns on the backburner is false; all such attempts have come to grief on
the realities of how people understand the world they inhabit. As the
history of organized labor has repeatedly shown, division is not caused by
those who have challenged racism or sexism, those who have challenged
discrimination in any form – rather division is caused by the reality of such
discrimination and perpetuated by those who wish to close their eyes to truths
others know to be true through experience.

The importance of incorporating that experience in the
Sanders campaign was expressed in an article by Bill Fletcher Jr. “The
suggestion that race can be resolved through an appeal to class and economic
justice alone suggests that economic justice will equally resolve the racial
differential,” Fletcher wrote.

“It is not simply a matter of ‘a rising tide raises
all boats’. The reality is that all boats may rise, but who finds one’s self in
which portion of each boat? Or, to use the metaphor of the Titanic, who is in
steerage and who is closer to the main deck?

“When movements like #BlackLivesMatter and many in the
immigrant rights movement point to this matter of racial injustice, they are
not suggesting attention for a ‘special interest.’ Rather, they are pointing
out that there can actually be no economic justice in the absence of racial
justice. There can be no unity without a commitment to the fight for equality
and justice. These struggles are interlinked. The sort of ‘political
revolution’ that the Sanders Campaign proclaims has been a long time coming.
Yet it will never arrive if there is not a full recognition that the class
struggle overlaps that of racial justice. The ruling elites, for several
centuries, have appreciated that race is the trip wire of U.S. politics and
social movements. When will progressives arrive at the same conclusion?”

What follows is a consideration of several ways of
connecting the dots to which Fletcher alludes. Taken together as an
overview they may inform an orientation toward the Sanders campaign in its
specificity and toward the broader challenge of addressing universality and
difference, of building a unity that is genuine because it is built upon an
appreciation of the fuller dimension of how social injustices impact upon
individuals in all aspects of life.

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Mission Statement

Welcome to the PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE. We are a multi-racial, multi-issue "rainbow coalition" dedicated to social justice, peace and building progressive power. Our key priorities include economic justice; equal rights and equal opportunities for all regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation; international solidarity; humanitarian service; eradicating poverty at home and abroad; environmental protection and sustainable development; and electing progressives to public office and then holding them accountable.

Founded in 2005, we have grown to more than 7,000 members and have emerged as one of the largest and most grassroots activist groups in California. We are proud to serve as a local chapter Our Revolution, the national movement inspired by Bernie Sanders' historic 2016 Presidential Campaign, and as a local affiliate of United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ), a network of several hundred peace and justice groups from all over the world.

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